Lily King: The English Teacher

October, 1979

THAT SHE HAD NOT KILLED HIM IN HER SLEEP WAS STILL THE GREAT RELIEF of every morning.

Not that she actually believed he was dead when he slept in on a Saturday. It was merely a leftover ritual, the weak ghost of an old fear from years ago when she awoke and waited, barely breathing, as close to prayer as she had ever got in her life, for a single sound of him: a little sigh, or the scrape of his feetie pajamas across the floor. He’d scuffle into her room still warm and puffy and half asleep, and the piercing relief of him collided with the horror of possessing such a fear and the dread of its return the next morning.

Now here he was at quarter of eleven, finally, his boots whacking the stairs, missing steps, his shirt unbuttoned but with an under-shirt beneath (she didn’t know what grew on his chest now and didn’t want to). He shook out half a box of cereal and ate it in a few loud smacks at the other end of the table. Still, what sweetness flooded beneath her skin! She did not, could not, let him see it, and instead told him to remember to close his mouth please.

His back to her, carrying the empty bowl to the sink, he said he was going over to Jason’s. To take apart a television.

She watched him cross the soccer fields diagonally — no home games today, thank God — and disappear down the path to Jason’s house. All the delicious, fleeting relief of him went, too.

She returned to the mounds of essays in front of her. Within a few hours she reached the bottom of the freshman papers and moved on to the juniors’. Peter didn’t come home for lunch, so she forgot to eat.

Vida began to contemplate canceling her plans for the evening. Tom would want to touch her again, scrape his mustache against her neck. Her armpits grew slippery. The telephone on the wall urged her on — a virus, a migraine. A quick call and it could all be over, the sweating, the rancid taste, and the sensation that she was no longer inside her body but beside it. And yet it was this disassociation that immobilized her, prevented her from getting up from her grading and walking the five paces to the phone. Instead she continued to watch the pen in her hand make small thick checkmarks beside the strong passages, and larger aggressive comments beside the weak, and then, below the last line of each essay, deposit a grade. She always graded more harshly in the afternoon before an evening with Tom Belou.

Peter answered the door. When had he come home? She hadn’t heard the doorbell. It would be Lloyd or Wendell, the custodians, looking for an extra hand to move some chairs from one wing to another. But then there was a strange swishing in the hallway, coming at her, and Tom himself appeared in her kitchen. He was wearing a parka. She’d never seen him in any sort of coat. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since last weekend. It was beige, with a belt he let dangle at the sides.

“You off to climb Everest?” she said, feeling trapped in her seat at the table. She didn’t go to great lengths primping before she saw him, but she did brush her hair and her teeth and change out of her old slippers with the stuffing bulging out. Until this moment their encounters had been quite formal, with precise beginnings and ends, no sleepovers, no weekends away. Neither had ever dropped in on the other like this; their children had never met. Their touching was tentative, nearly absentminded, though her memory of it was acute, a confusing ache of pleasure and shame. No intercourse. Miraculously, they were in silent agreement about that.

Her dog Walt nudged Tom’s hand with the long bridge of his nose, but Tom didn’t respond as he usually did. He just stood there in the doorway, his eyes flicking over her impatiently. He was going to break it off. It couldn’t have been clearer to her. This was just the way he would do it, in person, in a parka, perhaps after a trip to the dump. He needn’t bother. It was hardly anything to her. She had enjoyed his company, his lack of demands on her, but that couldn’t have lasted much longer.

“I’m sorry,” he said, pointing to the sea of essays, “I know I’m interrupting.” His hands were red from the cold.

Let’s just get it over with, she thought, anger and humiliation prickling her throat. Her mind felt calm, detached, but her heart had another engine altogether and thudded painfully.

“I just had this … I was planning to … but it just made me so crazy, all the …” He walked the length of the kitchen, away from her, the bulky parka sleeves squealing as his arms flailed about. She wondered if he’d stitched it himself, this awful coat.

She wished she’d never said she loved him. She was just being polite, returning the compliment late one evening. But now it turned out he’d been mistaken. Of course it had been too soon. His wife had only been dead a short while. She wished he’d just spit it out and go home.

He reached the far counter, spun around, and with three long strides he was there before her, hovering over her and her work. He smelled of something familiar. Maple syrup, maybe. His eyes finally settled on hers. “I love you, Vida. I do. But it’s not enough for me. It’s not enough to simply love you. I wish for everyone’s sake it were but it’s not. I want to marry you.” A laugh or a sob, Vida couldn’t tell which, pushed its way out of his chest. “I want to marry you.”

Out of the parka came a ring, no box, that clinked as it landed in her teacup. “Damn,” he said, fishing it out with thick shaking fingers. “I’m sure you’ve had better proposals than this. I’m just not that type.”

It was, in fact, her first proposal. Another woman, a better woman, might have confessed this. She never would. She had let him believe, along with everyone else up here, that she’d been married to Peter’s father.

The ring hovered now, too, caught in the tips of his fingers. Suddenly she understood the true role of the ring. It forced, as T. S. Eliot would say, the moment to its crisis. Without it, a proposal was just a question, a query, and the response could be the beginning of a conversation that might last weeks, or years. But the ring demanded the final answer within a few seconds. You either reached up and took it, or you kept your hand on top of Hank Fish’s essay on Emerson. And once you took it, you’d have an awkward time of giving it back. But to not take the ring, to leave it untouched, to watch it go back into the parka pocket, the proposal marked with a fat F — who could deliver that blow? She heard Peter upstairs, crossing the landing to the bathroom. She’d always imagined these moments filled with ecstatic conviction, but this moment was about ending the embarrassment, stopping the shallow breaths through Tom’s nostrils and the little laugh-sobs he was trying to suppress. It was about Peter upstairs and her terror of the mornings and all the years they’d been alone together in this house.

Whether she spoke or simply nodded she’d never know. All she knew was that the ring, several sizes too big, was slipped on her finger and Tom was kissing her, then burying his face in her hair, then kissing her again. Everything felt rubbery. She had the sense, despite his enthusiasm, that it wasn’t really happening this way, that they were rehearsing, hypothesizing, and that the real moment would happen later, would happen differently.

Tom called up to Peter, who launched himself down the stairs immediately, his lack of athleticism embarrassing to her in Tom’s presence. His face was bright red. He already knew. Even before Tom made the announcement, clutching her at the shoulders, she saw that Peter already knew.